“January” is a strong musical statement from a still-young band with a long history already behind it, and an album with an exceptionally wide-ranging programme - all of it played with assurance, purpose and focus. The disc reconfirms that the trio of Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz and Michal Miskiewicz is one of the most outstanding contemporary jazz groups.
“These are performances in which tempos, phrasing, articulation and the execution of ornaments are convincing,” wrote Gramophone of Jarrett’s first recorded account of The Well-Tempered Clavier. “Both instrument and performer serve as unobtrusive media through which the music emerges without enhancement.” In this live recording from Troy, New York, made in March 1987, just one month after his studio recording of the work, Keith Jarrett addresses the challenges of Bach’s great set of preludes and fugues once more. Part of the goal is transparency, to bring the listener closer to the composer. As Jarrett explained at the time: “The very direction of the lines, the moving lines of notes, are inherently expressive…When I play Bach, I hear almost the process of thought. Any colouration has nothing to do with this process.“
The title She's Back implies Dionne Warwick has been gone for much longer than the five years that separate the record from its predecessor, 2014's Feels So Good, but it's intended to convey that this 2019 album finds Warwick returning to R&B and soul, the music that originally made her a star in the '60s. The publicity surrounding She's Back claimed that this was her first R&B album since Soulful, an LP released on Scepter way back in 1969, but to a certain extent, this is a matter of splitting hairs. Warwick kept having R&B hits well into the late '80s and she easily glided between soul and easy listening even at the start of her career.
Violinists will sometimes delay recording Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin until they feel they have mastered the music and even let it become second nature to them. Not so Thomas Zehetmair, who, with guidance from his mentor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, first recorded the Sei Solo in 1982 for Teldec, then waited almost four decades before revisiting them for ECM New Series. This time span has permitted Zehetmair sufficient space to reevaluate Bach's masterpiece and to present the music with a mature appreciation of its contrapuntal intricacy and expressive depth.
A solo concert from Keith Jarrett - recorded at Munich’s Philharmonic Hall on July 16, 2016, on the last night of a tour - finds the great improvising pianist at a peak of invention. Creating a spontaneous suite of forms in the moment with the intuitive assurance of a master builder interspersing touches of the blues and folksong lyricism between pieces of polyrhythmic and harmonic complexity - he delivers one of his very finest performances. An attentive and appreciative audience hangs on every note, every nuance, and is rewarded with some tender encores including a magical version of “It’s A Lonesome Old Town".